The rise of labor unions was an essential movement that shaped the American workplace. Unions were formed to achieve safer conditions, more reasonable hours and fair compensation for workers. To this day, unions serve those same purposes in a wide variety of fields. And there may be an increase in unions over the next couple of months.
Recently, Northwestern University’s football team made a push toward bringing unionization to college athletics. Former Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter announced the creation of the College Athletes Players Association, which was petitioning Chicago’s regional National Labor Relations Board for union recognition.
The mission of the union is largely to protect player rights. Colter argues that college athletes’ work makes them employees. As employees, they would be eligible for union financial aid to cover injury expenses, due process before any athlete loses a scholarship and independent concussion experts on the sidelines of games to prevent injured players from aggravating injuries.
These demands are extremely reasonable. Student-athletes need protection so that athletic injuries do not jeopardize their education. An injury like a concussion sidelines a player not only from the field but from the classroom as well. Ensuring that objective physicians are on the sideline so these injuries are not aggravated could be extremely beneficial.
It is also essential that schools fully cover injuries that occur while playing a sport. There is absolutely no reason students should pay for surgical procedures for injuries suffered while wearing a school’s colors. Especially if an athlete is on a scholarship, part of the agreement to play for a school should include protection from consequences of that participation.
But is unionization the best way to solve this problem? While money is allegedly not the driving force behind the push for unionization, CAPA wants players to have the cost of living paid for, to receive the profits from commercials they appear in and to get assistance from a fund set up to help former athletes graduate. These demands are more than enough reason for the NCAA to see the push for unionization as purely motivated by profit, regardless of what Colter and CAPA might argue. A rebranding of their approach is essential if athletes will ever gain any of these rights.
A similar yet different medium must be created. It is important to realize what a union is — an organization that protects and represents employees. This goes back to the entire question of whether college athletes are employees and even eligible to join a union. The sports they partake in, while extremely demanding and time-intensive, are voluntary. Student-athletes choose to join sports teams, and they do so without monetary compensation. Creating a union to protect student-athletes detracts from the overall message that they should have a safety net, not be rewarded with potential profits.
The NCAA is a nonprofit organization, but that does not mean individual members are not handsomely profiting. A huge conflict of interest is present because the main organization responsible for protecting student-athletes also benefits from their work. Individual schools that are assigned with protecting their students benefit from wins and will often attempt to achieve them at any cost to their players. The NCAA and athletic departments serve as both the CEO and the union in college athletics, and a distinction must be established.
Regardless of whether one agrees with all of CAPA’s demands, student-athletes do deserve a seat at the table to discuss their own rights and privileges. Granting the students a protective agency does not necessitate that all the demands will be met, just that students will have a chance for their voices to be heard. But is a union the proper way to reach these goals and have the student-athlete voice heard? It is clear that players need protection, but creating a union could be extremely detrimental to college sports as a whole. In the past few years, the NFL, NBA and NHL have all gone on strike because of conflicts between labor unions and their respective leagues. While none of these strikes were by any means the fault of the unions, it is important to recognize that disputes between parties can get extremely messy. And unlike each of those individual sports leagues, CAPA is attempting to unite every Division I sport.
The question is not so much whether athletes need protection, but from what source that protection comes. A protective entity could not only benefit students’ health, but also limit their practice time and give them more time to focus on academics. The issue may be fixed by something as simple as semantics. A union is meant for employees, but that doesn’t mean other protective agencies cannot be formed to aid student-athletes. If this union is not recognized, CAPA can start instead as a grassroots organization at individual colleges and spread from there.
CAPA should focus its attention on becoming a nonprofit organization. It could be financed by both former athletes and Division I universities. All it would take to get this organization running is one or two large donations by professional athletes looking to protect college athletes. This organization would receive dues from universities trying to promote their institutions as being supportive of student-athlete safety. Creating an unaffiliated nonprofit is much less controversial than trying to unionize over 150 universities and is a much more feasible first step toward protecting student-athletes. The nonprofit could use the funds it receives to work, slowly but surely, on remedying many of the problems college athletes currently face. Furthermore, this type of organization would earn athletes a seat at the table with the NCAA. From there, anything can happen.
If you are LeBron James, Tom Brady or another interested party looking to donate to or advocate for a nonprofit organization to protect student-athletes, email Andrew Feldman ’15 at andrew_feldman@brown.edu for more information.
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